Like all iconic texts the Arthashastra was fated to be known more than read, to be quoted more than understood. The latest Penguin translation thought it fit to unconscionably rearrange all the passages according to their topicality, as if the text was a random series of quotes to be mined. But the publication of the Shamashastry edition in 1909 had energised not just the history of political thought, but the study of history as well. In retrospect, the output occasioned by the text till the ’40s is staggering in its scope and intensity. There were of course dangers in appropriating the texts. As early as 1916, K.V. Ramaswami Aiyangar had warned in this connection that issues pertaining to history were “being obscured and findings vitiated by the tendency to treat history as an ally of dogma and to look into the armoury of our ancient polity for weapons to be used in the arena of modern political controversies.”

But what, in retrospect, stands out about the intellectual milieu in which the text appeared in 1909 is this. First, the centrality of what we now broadly call the liberal arts, where a broad learned and for the most part liberal sensibility led to a new kind of interest in history and culture. Second, the gap between Sanskritists and a broader humanities culture was not as wide. We are now in a university system where even historians of ancient India struggle with Sanskrit, and Sanskritists cannot think beyond their ossified paradigms. There was an astonishing attempt in Indian universities to weave a rich set of traditional resources into a broad and deep debate without either being uncritical or apologetic; Sanskritists could in a certain sense perform the role of public intellectuals and ally that heritage to broad humanistic concerns. One can think randomly of Gopinath Kaviraj, Narendra Dev, Radhakamal Mukherjee, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Laxman Shastri Joshi or even Radhakrishnan. And certainly an astonishing burst of creativity in Hindi, Bengali and other literatures was as much a product of a cri-

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